How WWI Began

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2021

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On August 4, 1914, Britain declared war on Germany and entered the First World War. This was a conflict of unparalleled savagery with industrialized slaughter on a scale that the world had never seen before. To commemorate this important anniversary Dan guides us through what led Europe and the world to choose war in 1914. He explores some of the many different reasons for war from the miscalculations and misguided beliefs of European leaders to the structural causes such as the role of capitalism and imperialism that helped bring about the conflict. As well as unpacking the causes of the war he also looks at its consequences which we are still living with today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History It. I'm just sitting in the western
0:05.2	Solent not far from where Mary Rose sank, not far from the mouth of Port Smith
0:09.1	Harbor. I've just been into Port Smith, had lunch on board the wonderful destroyer
0:15.2	HMS Dragon, had about their exploits on their recent deployment into the Eastern
0:21.4	Mediterranean. I definitely realised on that journey that lots of people
0:24.9	listen to this podcast, seems to be the Navy, so it seems to me that looking at
0:28.6	a number of people that download and listen to this podcast, there probably aren't
0:31.2	many people who aren't in the Navy listening to it, so welcome everybody, great to meet
0:35.6	so many of you onboard Dragon, thank you for listening. Today is the anniversary of
0:39.9	Britain entering the First World War of Britain declaring war on Germany, which did it
0:44.0	2300 hours today in 1914, 4th of August. It's the day that we thought we should
0:50.2	note, we should commemorate here on the podcast, so I decided to record this podcast a bit
0:54.4	like the Spanish Ramada one and the Bismarck one earlier this year of me just talking about
0:58.1	what led Britain, what led Europe and the world to choose war in 1914. There's long been
1:06.0	a debate why the First World War starts, it's one of the most discussed and thought about
1:10.1	questions in recent history. There's of course a huge debate between the
1:13.4	contingency, between the railway timetables in Kaiser Wilhelm having a bit of a bad day
1:18.3	in the office, between Conrad von Hortzendorf, the Austrian chief of staff wanting to impress
1:23.0	his married girlfriend, and of course a bad luck surrounding friends, Ferdinand's
1:27.4	assassination in Sarajevo in June 1914. But there's also deeper, substructural factors,
1:33.0	the arms race, capitalism, imperialism, nationalism, all that sort of stuff. So in this podcast,
1:38.4	I try to unpack both of those explanations for war and tell the tale of how the world
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Hit, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of History Hit and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.